Two budding engineering classmates from Bengaluru, Komala and Kushal believe that curiosity is a very important skill for engineering students, which is currently missing. They regret that the education system has divided knowledge into important and not so important. The duo believes engineering students should develop products that can solve the problems of the consumer. With a mission to bring holistic and realistic thinking into Engineering graduates, from The VIMANA now both are on a Sapientury journey.
According to the 2011 Census Data, India has over 1.3 Billion Youth which is 27% of the total Indian Population. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-18 report, over 33% of the Skilled Youth of India are unemployed. As per the data shared by the HRD ministry, India has a total of 6,214 Engineering and Technology Institutions of which around 2.9 million students are enrolled. Every year on average 1.5 million students get their degree in engineering, but due to the lack of skill required to perform technical jobs less than 20 per cent get employment in their core domain.
A huge loss in terms of manpower and economy is the miserable state of the Indian technical education system. Unfortunately, there’s a huge gap between academia and the industry in many engineering colleges. The syllabus remains very outdated as compared to the existing technology. This system can only create degree holders and not true breed practical engineers. The majority of the engineers who graduate every year are bookish degree holders who lack industrial knowledge.
To bring out a constructive change to this, two youngsters founded Sapientury – an EdTech startup company in Bengaluru, that is helping engineering students become true engineers, instead of just degree-holders. In an exclusive interaction, Komala Chenna and Kushal Seekal Lakshmana Murthy talk about their inspiring journey into the world of engineering & entrepreneurship.
“The student’s interest, passion, hobbies and communication skills are given the least importance in our current education system. Students are asking what project they can work on rather than work towards solving a problem”, says Kushal. He believes time management is the key to project and finance management. Engineering students need to develop resilience and endurance to survive in this ever-dynamic industry.
The duo believes that analytical aptitude is a crucial skill that engineers must develop. “In the 21st century, we have crossed over the digital revolution and moved on to the social revolution where strong communication and collaboration skills are very important. Student must develop rich workmanship skills and ethics so that they can contribute to the growth of a company”, says Komala.
Taking off in The VIMANA!
In the year 2018 by Komala and Kushal, two budding engineers and classmates from RV College of Engineering, Bangalore who were sick of their academic life at college, started ‘The Vimana’. The initiative was aimed at creating a common ground between industry requirements and academic education by providing practical ‘experience’ and ‘outcome’ oriented projects and oftentimes connecting with facilitators from relevant industries. A huge success, Vimana took off initially with just five people and within no time reached over more than 500 students from various Colleges and Universities in the city of Bangalore. The members of the organization were provided with project components, tinkering kits, free online courses, support materials and archives.
With prior experience at Vimana, Kushal and Komala decided to step into the Ed-Tech sector. In 2021, they started with Sapientury and got it incubated at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore. Sapientury is one of the top 50 student startups as recognized by StartupIndia from over 17,000+ Indian colleges. They were adjudged winners at the Pitchfest TiE Mysuru chapter and went on to become the Semifinalists among the top 27 teams all over the world for the TiE Global pitchfest 2021. In May 2021, they are got elected as a part of the NASCOM Foundation and CISCO Thingqbator to work alongside them at Bangalore’s IKP Knowledge Park.
Google Meet & Zoom Meet is not Digital Transformation
As per Kushal, there’s always a concern over the quality of the Indian Technical education system. There is a huge gap between the existing industry trends and the academic curriculum. “A student from the Aerospace Department of RV College of Engineering in Bangalore was quite unsatisfied with the Indian Technical Education System. He wanted to bring a change in this system by providing the students with experience-based learning through Sapinetury”, adds Kushal. The COVID19 pandemic has indeed worsened the quality of the Indian Technical Education System in the name of digital learning. Kushal adds, “there’s a false understanding of digital transformation. From brick and mortar university to zoom classes, google meet and google transformation is not digital transformation.”
Komala understands the lack of industry-oriented learning at the universities. “We know for a fact that interviews and placements do not happen during the four years of work but simply happen on the filtration of the GPA and what questions they ask you in the interview which sometimes can be literally from the textbooks. You don’t need to go to a four-year engineering course”, says Komala, classmate to Kushal at the Department Of Aerospace at the RV College Of Engineering. She believes that just a four-year engineering course cannot make a student industry-ready.
Impacting Lives through Continous Learning
With the experience working at Vimana for a year, Kushal had a clear cut idea of what he should do in future. “The challenge was to understand from the market perspective on what universities lack, and find out what we are going to solve. We had to define our vision and our mission.” Kushal was very keen to understand and analyze the dynamic Ed-Tech sector by conducting detailed market research. Learning new things was one of the core foundations of Sapientury, Founders and the entire team is continuously upskilling themselves. “We are thankful to IIM-Bangalore for incubating Sapientury extremely beneficial physical, virtual and human resources”, adds Kushal.
Komala has been working with a lot of interns in the last couple of months who are working in different departments of Sapientury. Looking back at the journey she said, “It was initially just a team of Kushal, Deepika and me. We added on more people with time, who are actively working in different departments.” The team members of Sapientury are in constant discussion with students and professors. Komala feels happy that they are providing good quality courses which are well received by the customers. “We have got 150 registrations so far who have paid for the Beta-Version of the product. This has given us a lot of motivation to provide the requirements of the students”, adds Komala.
With Sapientury Komala and Kushal is looking to impact the lives of students through the events and workshops, with a mission to make quality education accessible to all at affordable rates. For making the Sapientury Platform a robust one, they launched Arduino Bootcamp. “The Arduino Bootcamp is a 500-minute course, and over the last 6 weeks, which was well-received”, said Kushal. “We have created micro-courses in our platform like interactive content with which students can interact”, added Komala. They developed Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Kits, considering the lack of hands-on experience provided by engineering colleges.
Making Students Career & Life Ready
“Sapientury is founded with a vision, to offer different phases of learning, and make the students career-ready and life-ready”, said Komala and Kushal. Currently, Sapientury has courses that are catering to engineers, especially those from the electronics domain. “We would like to explore and add other major streams of education apart from engineering. We strongly believe Sapientury would be a popular learning brand shortly. We want to expand our target audience along with the course catalogue. We want to be the best or else nothing”, says Komala. Kushal envisions Sapintury to be this one-stop destination for all curious minds. “We want to understand the aspirations of students for being an entrepreneur or being placed in a company.”
“The pandemic was unexpected and created dents in our plan. There is havoc in the supply chain and we are dependent on components that need to be sourced within and outside the country”, said Kushal. The disruption in the supply chain has increased the prices and the duo don’t want to increase the price of the course. Also, with DIY Kits there are delivery issues and the duo are optimistic that they can find ways to bounce back in the market. Komala is thankful to all the frontline warriors who have dedicated their lives to fighting the COVID19 pandemic. “I would like to thank GOD, that we were able to work”. She strongly believes that the pandemic has given their team innovative and creative ideas for the future.